Monthly Archives: August 2007

Click to Start – Do You Berry?

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Ok, it’s official, I’m on crack. I’m addicted. My need for a fix gets greater each minute that passes, and I’m increasingly caving to the impulse whenever it calls me. No, I’m not smoking crack cocaine, I’m checking my email.

I’ve recently become the proud owner of a Blackberry. A device so addictive that some have dubbed it the ‘crackberry’. It’s blue, not much larger than a pack of cigarettes, and the single most cool toy I’ve ever owned.

Blackberries were launched in the USA a few years ago, but have only recently become available in Australia. A Blackberry is a mobile phone, organiser, and ‘always on email’ device. The organiser includes the usual diary, contact book, task list, note pad and other gadgets – a continuation of the convergence of mobile phones and handheld electronic organisers; why carry two devices when one will suffice?

What sets the Blackberry apart is its email functionality. It includes a live email system. Send me an email, and it arrives on my Blackberry straight away, via my Blackberry email account, which can be configured to check and relay up to 10 standard email accounts. So now both my work and personal email addresses feed through to the Blackberry, and as long as I’m in an area with GSM mobile phone coverage, I see the email immediately.

If I’m travelling overseas, and have activated global roaming with Telstra, the Blackberry functions the same whatever country I am in.

I can even check sales on my company’s online publications because the Blackberry includes a web browser. We’ve set up private web pages displaying recent sales data, so in the middle of the night I can lean over to the bedside table and see how the bank account is fairing.

There is a common inbox, combining my email, voice mails, SMS messages – and a record of outgoing messages, all grouped by date, so I can monitor the progression of my day. The diary pops up reminders of meetings and tasks, and the address book inter-locks with the email and messaging system so sending an email, SMS or making a call can all be done at the push of a button after selecting a person’s name. And then when I’m back at my desk, the Blackberry connects to my computer and re-synchronises the data with my copy of Outlook – all the while recharging the battery via the same cable (no need for a separate battery charger).

Of course Blackberries are not the only game in town. You can achieve similar functionality using the latest generation of Windows-powered mobile phones, which essentially combine a mobile phone with a Windows based operating system – they even allow you to work in Microsoft Word and Excel, albeit on a tiny screen. And with the advent of the G3 high speed mobile phone network (the one which lets you make video calls), you can watch streaming movies and listen to audio tracks.

The impact of mobile devices such as the Blackberries is profound on both serious and less serious levels. For example, after the September 11 attacks in America, Blackberries gained notoriety in Washington when they were unaffected after normal mobile phones were rendered useless by overloaded mobile networks. Government officials were able to continue to communicate during a period of emergency because the Blackberry used a different data network to that of normal mobiles.

And on a lighter note, the Blackberry has become the dating tool du jour amongst congressional workers in the US capital, after the government issued them even to junior staffers, so work could continue day and night. The unforeseen consequence was the staffers using them to swap witty messages with potential love interests around the clock. It’s even reported they use their Blackberries to flirt discreetly in meetings. ‘Berry’ has become a verb. We ‘Berry’ someone, we sit in a meeting ‘Berrying’.

So why is all this important? Because the Blackberry has several overwhelming advantages over its Windows powered convergent mobile phone cousins. A three year old can use it; there’s no battling with complex menus; it doesn’t crash every five minutes; battery time is phenomenal (I get 4 or 5 days of normal use between charges); and cost wise it’s not too terrible because you can buy it on a plan just like a mobile. The handsets retail for around $1,000, but you can pay it off in instalments. In any case, given the normal rapid fall in price of any mass produced electronic device, the Blackberry will be half that price in a year or two.

Flash Gordon and Dick Tracey have finally arrived. A universal communicator, useable pretty much anywhere in the world, combining all the elements of your electronic life in one neat package, at a price which many can now afford. The Telstra sales representative who sold me my Blackberry had just also sold one to a woman who was off travelling through Africa, and was concerned about email access. With a Blackberry in her handbag, it didn’t matter about dialling up to the net in remote areas; lugging a laptop and cables; or finding an Internet Café. As long as she was within a mobile phone coverage area – which these days does include most third world countries – she could always be in touch with home and office.

Of course addiction is dangerous. I found myself Berrying in the cinema the other day, answering emails while watching the new Harry Potter movie with my children. My addiction is advance warning of the way in which people will communicate and interact in the future – and I mean the near future, not in ten years. Mobile phones have almost reached saturation point in Australia, and true to form we are constantly updating to the latest and greatest technology.

This is communication for the 21st century – immediate, constant and integrated with our personal and professional lives, again furthering the blur between work and home. These are the tools we need to use to capture someone’s attention, to interact with them, to promote our cause to them, to market our new show, exhibition or product. Blackberries have found a foothold amongst a desirable market segment – the young professionals, whose law, finance and accounting firms are implementing enterprise Blackberry solutions. They are young, educated, financially prosperous, technologically savvy – and they Berry.

Click to Start – A Tourniquet on Cultural Endeavour

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Do you broadband? I know I do. If you do, can you imagine
going back to dialup? I know I can’t. Data makes the world go round, literally
these days. Which is why it’s a pity that a new research report has found Australia remains the broadband backwater of the world.

Back in August 2003 I wrote a Click to Start column entitled ‘Twenty
Years of Shooting Ourselves in the Foot’ [i]. The article was sparked by Telstra relaunching
BigPond, with sassy advertisements, and deals so you could buy ADSL broadband internet from Harvey Norman. It was all about Telstra attempting to re-gain
momentum in the broadband internet access marketplace.

It all went so swimmingly well – except it seemed to have
no effect.

In that article I also gave some of the research which
had found Australia ranked pretty much last in the OECD countries for broadband users
per 100 people. I also noted that the price-gouging fee schedules were
going to be a problem. And I was right – earlier this year Telstra re-launched
all over again, even sassier advertisements, and broadband priced from
$29.95 – the average cost of a dialup internet connection. Bringing down
the wrath of the ACCC in the process, because this was less than the wholesale
price Telstra was charging its ADSL resellers, consequently dramatically
undercutting them.

But, as with everything to do with Telstra, there’s always
a catch. $29.95 only gets you 256k/64k speeds – which barely qualifies
as broadband, and a cap of 200 meg of data a month – which is nothing.
I’d go through that in a few days. Telstra almost owns up, they describe
it as ‘Light use, or exploring ADSL’. If you want faster speeds, or bigger
downloads, then you’ll pay – big time.

I thought it might be interesting to revisit the issue,
and I’m prompted by research just released which says Australia is still in a ‘broadband backwater’. Research company IDC says [ii]:

“Australia will
have a broadband penetration of 13% by 2008. The study reveals that Australia remains
in the broadband backwater when benchmarked against other developed countries,
and alarmingly IDC predicts the situation will remain the same over the

next 5 years.”

It’s not just the actual number of connections, it’s the

speed as well:

“IDC found that most Australia broadband subscribers
have an access download speed of 256 or 512Kbps, which significantly
limits the delivery of content and hinders potential initiatives for
high-content value proposition such as TVoVDSL [TV
over the internet] and VoIP services. [voice services over the internet]”

IDC offers contrasts with other countries:

“For example, France‘s
second largest broadband service providers, Iliad, offers free national
phone calls, 2Mpbs ADSL and 100+ TV channels for about the third of the
price for what you would get in Australia.
There is still a long way to go for Australian consumers to get a decent
deal”

It’s interesting that Telstra is all of a sudden offering 100 free local calls to customers who bundle telephone, mobile and internet
on the one bill – clearly they’ve been watching countries like France. But they can’t bring themselves to match the offers available overseas. We all know price is a key driver – Telstra’s reported a huge surge in
the number of people signing up for the new el-cheapo broadband.

But it’s a false success. It’s also clear that once those people have signed on and used the service for a month or two, Telstra
is hoping they will upgrade to higher plans, once the customers realise they’ve got a kind of claytons broadband – the lowest possible speed, and
the minimum amount of data. Restrictions which will inevitably become frustrating, forcing them to stump up for the higher access plans – which start at $49.95
a month, and still with speed caps. Low speeds and low caps are like squeezing the bandwidth pipe – it’s capable of much more, but for commercial reasons
Telstra clamps it down, restricting the data flow.

We’ve got Telstra ADSL at home, we pay $90 a month for
a 512k connection and no usage cap. No cap is great, but the speed is still
at the low end of what is technically termed broadband. I’d far rather
be in the USA for example. ATT, one of their big telecommunications companies will
give me a 1.5meg/128k ADSL plan for $US39.95 a month – that’s about $AUD59.
The equivalent plan with Telstra costs $AUD119.95 a month. I remember my first online experience. It was around 1991, while working for a theatre in Sydney. I discovered a modem tucked away, and discovered I could connect it to one of the PCs in the office. I dialled up and connected to the Dick
Smith Electronics Bulletin Board. Bulletin Boards were a kind of precursor
to the internet for many people. They were private communities, accessed
via a dialup connection. In the case of the DSE Board, it gave you the
chance to download files and send messages to each other. It was slow,
oh so slow – using a 2,400 baud modem (that’s about 10 times slower than
the present day 56k dial up modems, and 100 times slower than my current
512k home broadband internet connection (and 200 times slower than my office
internet connection).

But I didn’t notice the speed – for two reasons. First
I had nothing to benchmark it against, I just thought this was normal. Secondly,
I was only working with text – no pictures, no sound, no web pages, no
movies, just lines of text on a monochrome computer screen.

I can’t really remember much of what I used the DSE Board
for, but as a certified geek, I probably just revelled in the warm feeling
of making it work, irrespective of the practical application.

Over the years I sped up. In 1992 or so I encountered the
internet for the first time – just before the world wide web arrived. I
used Gopher and Archie and a number of other online tools – all text based – to
search library catalogues and to participate in discussion groups. Back
then the literary arts were online – books, essays, stories, poetry. Text
based art was the only art which was possible (other than ASCII art – making
pictures with keyboard characters). I went from my trusty 2,400 baud modem
to a 9,600 baud version, and then, with the advent of the world wide web
in all its graphic glory, what I thought was luxury – a 28,000 baud modem.
It could even send faxes as well.

In the mid-1990s I moved to a 56k modem – and I thought
all my Christmases had come at once. And in the late 1990s I moved to
ISDN (an old technology Telstra continued to try and flog as a high speed
internet alternative as a way of avoiding rolling out ADSL, and maximising
profits – ISDN was very expensive and Telstra made a bundle from it).

Then finally I moved to a broadband ADSL connection, when
we installed one at the office – and all my Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries
and public holidays had arrived – a 1 megabyte broadband internet connection.
Fast enough to watch movies, listen to music, transfer large files etc.

It changed our business. With our ISDN connection it used
to take an hour and a half to email an Arts Hub Jobs Bulletin. Now it clears
in 10 minutes.

So what’s the point of this little history lesson? My speed
of access kept pace – generally – with my use of the Internet. Broadband
for me in 1991 wouldn’t have been such a big boon.

But that was 13 years ago. The world has changed. What
seems unfortunate to me is that certain elements in our community don’t
understand the degree to which the world has changed, or harbour other
more selfish reasons for not keeping pace.

Try searching Google for ‘importance of broadband’ and
you’ll quickly get the picture of why broadband is so completely critical.
For example, you’ll find a report by US internet equipment giant Cisco [iii], which discusses a study named ‘Net Impact
in 2002’, conducted by a group of researchers, which concluded that:

“Results indicate that adopting IBSs [internet
business solutions] in both the United
States and Europe would
generate substantial productivity gains. Consider the United States first: The
study forecasts that Internet business solutions alone could account
for 48 percent of the projected U.S. productivity
growth rate by 2010.

Europe paints a similar picture. When all current and planned IBSs are complete by 2010, the Net Impact study concludes that these

solutions could account for 30 percent of the projected European productivity growth rate.”

I think this quote sets the context well, it’s from a report
entitled ‘Developing Broadband Infrastructure and Services in Western Australia’ released in September
2003 [iv]:

“The economic case for broadband and its significance can be put into context by looking at similar capacity changes in national

infrastructure such as rail, roads, electricity and telecommunications.
Each of these significantly changed the way that economic activity was
undertaken by firms and citizens, enabling new activities to develop,
providing economies with competitive and comparative advantages. Importantly,
many of these benefits were unforeseen when the original infrastructure
investments were made, yet today it is difficult to conceive how our
daily lives and economic activity would function in their absence.”

It’s the final sentence which is possibly the most important.
It’s about the latent demand, the activities and use which only become
possible once the broadband infrastructure becomes available – but which
might not be specifically identifiable now.

Writing in the M/C Journal Gerard Goggin rounds off the subject nicely [v]:

“The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology.
We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand
their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework
us as subjects.”

The government keeps telling us Australia is a film-making capital of the world. The government keeps banging
on how Melbourne is a hot computer gaming software centre. The government keeps promoting Australia’s unique capacity for cultural creation.

But gee, we were doing those things before broadband came
along.

In an article entitled ‘The Future of Work in The Creative
Age’, the Executive Director of The California Institute for Smart Communities, John
M. Eger, writing on the Cultural
Commons web site in May this year, talks about the advance of the ‘Creative
Age’ – highlighted by Richard Florida’s now seminal book ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’.

Eger suggests there are three things hindering the rise of the creatives [vi]:

“We also need to begin the process of nurturing “the Creative Community”, one that that fully recognizes the basic shift

in the structure of the global economy from one based on the production
of goods and services to one based on the production, storage, transfer
and use of knowledge or information; and, as such, promotes: 1) connectivity
to ensure we have the new–broadband, 24/7, wired and wireless–information
infrastructures for the 21st century; 2) collaboration and civic engagement
to provide the kind of leadership the digital age requires; and 3) creativity
in all its forms–in the schools, in the workplace, and throughout the
community.”

In his book, Richard Florida calculates the value to the US economy of the ‘creative class’ as “nearly half all wage and salary income in the United States, $1.7 trillion dollars, as much as the manufacturing and service
sectors combined”.

Now, if we could resolve the issues Eger raises, and
if Florida’s numbers are right, that’s a mighty powerful argument for taking
the lead and resolving the data and information infrastructures servicing Australia’s population.

Memo to the Australian Government, CC to Telstra: Lack
of affordable bandwidth is like a tourniquet on cultural endeavour. It
slows communication; it impedes commercial enterprise; it restricts discourse;
it adds costs to the creators of cultural content; and it prevents audiences
consuming the content. And it ensures Australia will remain at the bottom of the global ladder. So much for the Clever
Country – more like the slow country.

Click to Start – Campaigning Online

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I’ve recently developed an interest in the use of online in the political

  sphere. Reading a number of books on the subject I was struck at the parallels

  with cultural endeavours. Political parties aim to encourage votes; cultural

  organisations solicit attendance and participation. Political parties operate

  on a combination of government funding and donations (providing they secure

  a minimum percentage of the vote, political candidates receive government support

  for an election campaign); cultural organisations survive on government subsidy,

  earnt income and fundraising.

Online and politics are relatively new bedfellows. Online political campaigning

  is most visible in the United States , yet it really only became relevant in

  the 2000 presidential campaign. Bill Clinton did have a web site in 1996 prior

  to election (making him the first US President to do so), but it was barely

relevant to the campaign.

Fast forward a few years and the John Kerry campaign has just announced it

  has raised $US180 million in the quest to elect Kerry. It’s a huge number – but

  critically, $US56 million of it has been raised online, nearly a third of all

  donations. And the majority of donations are small. “Contributions of $250

  or less made up $100 million, a reflection of the growing importance of small

donors in the campaign finance world.” 1

Why is it that cultural organisations in Australia don’t solicit donations

  online? Many are registered to accept tax deductible contributions. Many organisations

  have their membership programs tucked away somewhere on their web site, although

  I remain amazed at the number of major institutions who still have not enabled

  online membership applications. A year ago I wrote a Click to Start column

  entitled ‘Path To Fulfilment Littered With Obstacles’. 2 In

  the article I went into detail about the link between online and philanthropy,

  and quoted various research supporting the thesis that online should be an

  essential fundraising tool for the arts. I then did a quick survey of major

  arts institutions in Australia , looking at the most basic fundraising transaction – membership

joining.

Here’s the results from July 2003:


 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

Institution

Online Memberships

Art Gallery of NSW

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Art Gallery of Western Australia

No membership form, contact the organisation.

Australian Centre for Moving Image

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Australian Film Institute

Submit online form, not live credit card

Australian Museum

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Melbourne Museum

No membership form, contact the organisation.

National Gallery of Australia

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

National Gallery of Victoria

Live, online membership joining

National Museum of Australia

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Queensland Art Gallery

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Queensland Museum

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

South Australian Museum

No membership form, contact the organisation.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

No membership form, contact the organisation.

Western Australian Museum

No membership form, contact the organisation.

And here are the results from July 2004:


 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

 


   

   

 

Institution

Online Memberships

Art Gallery of NSW

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Art Gallery of Western Australia

No membership form, contact the organisation.

Australian Centre for Moving Image

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Australian Film Institute

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Australian Museum

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Melbourne Museum

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

National Gallery of Australia

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

National Gallery of Victoria

Live, online membership joining

National Museum of Australia

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

Queensland Art Gallery

Live, online membership joining

Queensland Museum

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

South Australian Museum

Couldn’t find anything online

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

No membership form, contact the organisation.

Western Australian Museum

Fill out a form, send it in offline.

So, 12 months later, instead of one organisation letting your join online

  with a credit card, there are…two! Even more telling are the hoops you jump

  through to find out how to join. No one promotes it on their home page – despite

  the fact this is just about the only activity the web site can actually earn

  revenue from, other than a couple of institutions (like Queensland Art Gallery)

  who have online shops. Then again, those with shops don’t do much to promote

  their presence either. Their home pages are hardly covered with bright notices

  saying ‘yes, you CAN buy something from us online’. In most cases membership,

  donations and other forms of support are the best kept secrets online, usually

hidden away behind neutral menu titles like ‘About Us’, or ‘Join In’ or ‘Membership’.

A immensely practical book I’ve just finished reading is called ‘Winning Campaigns

  Online – Strategies for Candidates and Causes’ 3.

  The authors, Emilienne Ireland and Phil Tajitsu Nash, own a company in the

  USA which specialises in working on online political campaigns, and their book

  is chock full of straightforward, sensible advice, rendered in a simple, luddite-comprehensible

  style.

What if one in every hundred visitors to your web site joined up, bought a ticket, made a donation? How would that help the finances?

They’ve come up with ‘Ten Secrets of Successful E-Campaigns’ for politicians,

  a list of simple tactics for running an online political strategy:

Use the site to promote your whole campaign

What they mean is, make sure your web site promotes everything you do – it’s

  an extension of your organisation and its activities, not just a brochure.

Your offline campaign must promote your site

Why is that many organisations still don’t have their web address on their

  printed material? It’s just bizarre to me that an organisation, having spent

  a bundle on its web site, shouldn’t promote the heck out of the site at every

  opportunity. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing you cannot put your web

  address on – business cards, letterhead, your building, your tickets, your

  cars, your uniforms. You get the message.

Respond to emails within 48 hours

You probably think it the height of rudeness when someone doesn’t answer the

  phone, or doesn’t reply to your letter. Why should this be any different online?

  Email is now ubiquitous. I’m still amazed when I have conversations with arts

  managers who seem to think email is an intrusion, an ‘extra’ load, something

  to be dealt with when time permits. Get over it. Email is as integral to your

  daily communication as phone, fax and mail. If someone emails you, answer then

  promptly and helpfully.

Give people a reason to come back

Oh what bland web sites we weave. Half of them look like they were designed

  by committees of bureaucrats – most likely a true observation in the case of

  the large state institutions; the other half by a 14 year old underground electronic

  game art designer with a degree in ‘cool’ – a pity ‘cool’ doesn’t encompass

  basic forms of communication, like the written word. A good web site is open,

  inviting, and has constantly changing content. A good web site doesn’t hide

  its wares behind bland home pages and illogical and obtuse navigation.

Learn about your visitors

When was the last time you surveyed your web site visitors, or looked at your

  web server logs? How many of you know what percentage of visitors (you know,

  those big numbers you trumpeted to the board last month) are actually just

  search engine spiders and not real people. How old are your site users? Where

  do they live? Which pages on your web site are the most popular? Or least popular?

  What? You don’t know? How would you feel if you didn’t know what was the most

  popular of your physical building/exhibition/event/show activities?

Online donations: the “one percent” rule

“Candidates in Campaign 2000 found that, on average, one visitor in every

    hundred makes a donation, and the average online donation is quite high compared

    to direct mail.” 4 Gee. What if one

    in every hundred visitors to your web site joined up, bought a ticket, made

    a donation? How would that help the finances? Why are we so shy? I just did

    a quick tour of the main state theatre companies’ web sites, to see how obvious

    and easy they make it to buy a ticket – surely the most fundamental business

    activity of a theatre company. But, after looking at these sites, you start

    to wonder what they consider their most important business function:

The State Theatre Company of

    South Australia gets my vote, hands down. There’s a great picture of

    Rosalba Clemente, the artistic director, personally inviting you to ‘Join

    us’, and front and centre is the latest production, and a link to ‘Bookings & More

    Information’. I would have liked this to say ‘Buy a Ticket Now’, but you

    do get that after clicking through to the event page.

As a comparison have a look at http://www.villagecinemas.com.au/ –

  clear and simple promos for each of their major events, and a whopping big

  yellow button top and centre marked ‘Buy Tickets’. No great big warm and fuzzies,

  just a workmanlike approach focussed on extracting dollars. And it works – we

  always book online for the cinema, to save standing in the queue with our two

  children.

Make volunteering online easy and rewarding

If an arts organisation’s first priority is attendance, their next is very

  often recruiting support from the public – through volunteers, friends, supporters

  and the like. I’ve already discussed the issue of membership joining online

  (or almost complete lack thereof). The same comments apply to volunteer recruiting.

  All the major state institutions, art galleries and museums and the like, survive

  because they don’t have to foot the labour bill represented by the input of

  their volunteers. There is a fair variance in quality of information and services

  provided online to volunteers and members – the Art Gallery Society of NSW

  even runs online competitions for members. But yet again overall the web sites

  fail miserably to promote and recruit those people who form the lifeblood.

Permission campaigning, not spamming

The Australian Financial Review today is quoting a survey by Permission Communications,

  which has found 80% of 440 companies polled in Australia do not understand

  the Spam Act. I’d be pretty worried if that extrapolated into 80% of Australian

  arts organisations not understanding the Spam Act. If you don’t understand,

  learn, fast. Email is the cheapest, most effective form of one on one promotion

  at your disposal. The notion you don’t know, legally, what is allowed, is scary.

Viral campaigning: let your visitors help

The easiest way of achieving this is the simple ‘Send to a Friend’ button

  on a web page. We do this on Arts Hub, and hundreds of pages off our site are

  emailed around each month. It’s free promotion, of the best sort – one friend

  telling another friend about something they’ve found online. Why is it then,

  that, for example, the vast majority of theatre companies don’t have a button

  to send information about an event to a friend? (kudos to Sydney Theatre Company

  who have an Email a Friend link on each event page).

Don’t keep the genie in the bottle

In Winning Campaigns Online Ireland and Nash suggest finding a balance between

  allowing unsupervised volunteers build and run a web site, and management micro-managing

  the site to the extreme, cramping the style of those who actually know what

  they are doing. The same applies to cultural organisations online. You wouldn’t

  hire a plumber to design your subscription brochure, so why wouldn’t you hire

  a web development professional to produce your web site? As with everything,

  you get what you pay for. The problem is most arts organisations still seem

  to regard their web site as an extension of their brochure – a static promotional

  tool, reinforcing their traditional marketing channels.

Newsflash. Web sites can earn revenue. Mine earns lots of revenue – about

  90% of our company’s total annual income. And we have decided we’re too old

  fashioned in our online approach to sales and are about to do a big site update

  to bring us into line with the leaders in our particular industry sector.

Therein lies the next, and final message for today. The little survey of arts

  institutions earlier in this article highlights a complete and utter lack of

  progress in online deployment by the major arts institutions. Oh, I’m sure

  they’ve been doing lots of things like digitising collections for online and

  so on, and that’s great, and right and proper. But in terms of the web site

as a revenue earner, they’re standing still.

If you REALLY want to know how to sell things online, go read about it. There’s

  a plethora of material online – try one of my favourite sites Sherpa – http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ .

  I just finished chewing my way through the 420 pages of proceedings from ContentBiz’s

  4th Annual Subscriptions Summit, held in the USA a couple of months ago. You’ll

  discover how the big boys sell stuff online – it’s thought-provoking and fascinating – mostly

  because so many of their techniques are not difficult. It’s just they have

  the budgets to test, research and play with a multitude of ideas. And small

players like us can then skim the cream and learn from the masters.

Campaigning online, whether running for office, recruiting members or selling

  tickets, is an art form. It takes creativity, persistence, imagination – and,

most importantly, constant commitment, not just an annual review.

1. http://www.campaignline.com/webedition/page.cfm?navid=51&pageid=348

2. http://www.artshub.com.au/view/rd.asp?id=45197

3. ‘Winning

    Campaigns Online – Strategies for Candidates and Causes’

4. “Winning Campaigns Online” p44

Click to Start – Eventually disaster befalls everyone

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Once upon a time a wise old computer salesman told me there were only two types of computer owners – those whose hard drives have failed, and those whose hard drives are yet to fail. This sage also told me that as a computer retailer, he expected around 1 in 10 of the hard drives he sold to fail and come back under warranty.

I received this advice 15 years ago, and I’m happy to concede that advancing technologies, and improvements in manufacturing processes have probably improved the failure statistics. But the fact remains: if you are a business which relies on technological hardware to carry out day to day activities, one day you will have a failure. How that failure impacts on your business is a function of your preparedness for failure.

Research conducted by security and risk specialists at Ernst and Young found that companies have a 50-50 chance every year of their key computer systems failing for more than two hours.  1

Despite global governments’ attempts to panic the population following the tragedy of September 11 in New York, in the practical world of business risk, errors by humans in technology development is a greater worry than terrorism. A survey by technology company Veritas in 2003 of disaster recovery preparedness found ‘technological failure ranks highest in the list of perceived threats’, with hardware failure, and software and viruses at the top of the list, followed by fire, hackers and accidental employee errors.  2

Disaster can be caused by any number of factors, and is not limited to aeroplanes plummeting into tall office buildings. But the results are the same, failure of technological systems, and a flow on effect to the businesses and users which rely on those systems for everyday life. One of the positive outcomes of the terrorist attacks on New York has been a far greater recognition by corporations of the importance of disaster and business continuity planning. Consultancy firm Booz Allen Hamilton surveyed 72 chief executives from firms with revenues of more than $US1 billion just after the September 11 attacks, and, not surprisingly found 90% were reviewing their disaster planning documents.  3

All this disaster planning is great, but not much help if it is not taken seriously. Ernst and Young in a survey of 459 Chief Information Officers, IT Directors and business executives found 53% of large companies have business continuity plans designed to ensure their company could recover from, and continue to operate after, a disaster. What’s not such a help is that 21% have never tested their plan, and obviously thus have absolutely no idea if it would work. A triumph of documentation over practical implementation.  4

Our everyday lives are completely reliant on technology, technology which is created by human beings, who make continual mistakes; on behalf of companies which don’t test the human work and which, despite knowing that there is a better than even chance of the technology failing, write a report about what they think they might do if failure were to occur.

I’ll give you a practical example. We’ve just had a run of dramas in our office, over a couple of months. For a while we’d been experiencing problems with our main corporate server, we’ve had it for several years, and it was running the older Windows NT operating system. Once or twice a week it had a habit of crashing in the middle of the night. No one could work out why, but my best guess is it was related to a virus infection we caught some time ago – despite running anti-virus software.

Then one morning it crashed, and kept crashing, however many times we rebooted. The problem this time was deep inside the mail server part of Windows NT. Our computer support company couldn’t find a solution which didn’t involve completely wiping everything off the server and starting all over again. Given the age of the machine, and its hardware and software we took a deep breath and ordered a new server. It’s a gorgeous HP box, with the latest Windows 2003 server software and all the gadgets. The changeover took three days, during which we were without email a great deal of the time. Cost: $17,000.

Eventually everything settled down. Then last week we moved office. We planned everything down to the last 30 minutes with our internet provider, agreeing a specific time when we would grab all our servers from the old office, race down to the new office, they would cut over the internet connection, we’d boot up the boxes, and everyone presumed it would work fine.

Yeah right. I plugged in all the workstations. One went BANG and a puff of smoke floated up. Scratch one computer.

We plugged our internet router into the wall – no internet. Called the internet company – they thought we might need a new router. So they couriered one over a few hours later. No dice. So someone came to our office. Couldn’t fix it. Our staff were standing around – as we’re an online company, having no internet access means they can’t work. So we sent them home early.

By the end of the day we still were not online. I was standing outside the Victorian Arts Centre still on the phone to the computer company at 7.25pm, trying to get into a 7.30pm show. Nobody had a clear idea why, given nothing about our setup had changed except our address, the internet access shouldn’t work.

Cut to next morning. Still no access. We switched over to our backup internet connection – a standard Telstra ADSL connection. So now the staff could work online on the web, but still no email because that relied totally on the industrial strength internet connection working.

We wound up with three technicians onsite, and enough combined brainpower to put the space shuttle into orbit. By 3.45pm – 15 minutes before an Arts Hub bulletin publication deadline they got the internet connection working. The solution? A new cable. A cable which, they swear, to all intents and purposes was pretty much the same as all the other cables they had tried.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. How reliant on technology is my business?

2. How would my business be affected if:

a) One computer died

b) The server died

c) The internet connection died

3. How long can you survive if one or more or all of the above occurs?

4. What’s my backup plan, what will we do? Do my staff know what to do?

Will you all run around like headless chooks? Or do you have a documented plan of action, available to all staff, ready for implementation? Does the plan include the contact details for all of your technical support companies, including out of hours numbers (computers normally don’t break down during business hours)? Does it include all the vital information like administrator passwords, user names etc?

Simulating disaster is easy. Try turning off your file server and internet connection – how long could you last. Two hours? An afternoon? A day? Two days? Eventually disaster will always strike. And like the boy scouts say, you must ‘be prepared’.

1.  Link

2.  From “Veritas Disaster Recovery Research 2003”, an independent market research report by Dynamic Markets commissioned by VERITAS Software Corporation, surveyed IT managers with responsibility for their company’s disaster recovery plan in large companies across the United States, 10 European countries, the Middle East and South Africa. Link

3.  “How Corporate Security is Reshaping the Post-9/11 CEO Agenda”, Booz Allen Hamilton, 2002. Link

4.  From an Ernst and Young ‘Fast Facts’ entitled “Continuity and Availability Planning are Critical to Mitigating Systemic Risk”, Link

Click to Start – Written by the Readers

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It may sound strange, but it’s a well known fact around my house that I’m not a big fan of going to the theatre. Amongst other traits I have a habit of falling asleep about 20 minutes into the show. Which may all sound a little surprising when you consider a) I spent the first 15 years of my professional life working in the performing arts (the last three managing a performing arts centre); and b) I’m the co-founder and co-owner of the most widely read industry media outlet in the arts.

My normal comeback is I’m tainted by old habits – sitting at a production desk plotting lighting with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of brandy in the other. Well, ok, it was only one show we drank brandy throughout bump-in week. But it was a darn good brandy, and a darn good show moreover. Which of course means making me sit up straight and quiet for a couple of hours in front of a stage is a considerable challenge. I still can’t help myself, I still check the lighting rig, the audio, despite it being years since my heyday as a theatre tech.

After years working countless shows and endless performances, it takes a lot to capture my attention. Yet, most often, come an evening out, we settle the kids, brief the babysitter, and head out with me having almost no idea what we’re about to see (the social director of the household having made the necessary arrangements). It’s only when we’re seated I have a moment to scan the program and discover what joys the evening holds. Sometimes I recognise the names, sometimes not.

I do read the newspapers – one of the perks at Arts Hub is we have a big bunch of newspapers delivered through the week, including the interstaters, so there’s no shortage of exposure to arts event promotion. Oh, and did I mention I own a chunk of the country’s only arts news service? I’m supposed to know what’s going on, who’s doing what where, and when.

The problem is I hardly pay any attention at all these days to what I read in the newspaper. It’s not because I’m resistant – like most I like nothing better than settling in with the weekend magazine and a coffee in the garden on the weekend. The reason is the newspapers are no longer my sole source of information. Forget broadcast media. The only time I ever listen to the radio is in the car – which is usually with the children, which means Kylie Minogue on the stereo. The only TV news I see is Sky, BBC and CNN on cable late at night.

So where do I get my daily dose of world happenings? Well, let’s start with the half a dozen online newsletters I receive each day. Several are specific to my interests – web development, technology, subscription content. I get my gossip fix from Crikey. Plus I watch several web sites, use Google News to monitor specific issues – the list goes on.

The ‘traditional’ media, eg the non-online media, has taken a back seat. It’s only part of my daily dose, and it’s not the first thing I read each morning. In fact, I’ve now relegated the newspapers to lunch time reading – if I have time for lunch.

And what’s the big difference between the traditional and the online media I’m reading now – apart from the obvious difference between delivery methods? Might sound obvious, but after ten years of the growing and now widespread use by the population of the Internet, I’m still amazed at how many people in the arts don’t see the blinding light in front of their noses.

Traditional media is a one way pipe. Digital media is a two way pipe – it’s BIDIRECTIONAL. Virtually every source of online information I subscribe to has information traversing in two directions. The media source sends it out, the audience talks back. To take the concept a logical and inevitable step further, some digital media sources send out content which was created by the audience to start with – an easy example is Slashdot.org, the legendary site amongst web programmers and tech heads. They have something like 800,000 registered users, millions of readers, and are known for the famous Slashdot effect – when a web site is linked from Slashdot the resultant traffic is sometimes so heavy the promoted web site’s server crashes. Slashdot, at the end of a day, is a digest of news online. There’s even a digest of the digest – http://www.alterslash.org/. So how many writers does Slashdot employ? None. The content on Slashdot is entirely written by the readers.

And there’s the crux – it’s written by the readers.

Try this for size:

“In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003 , the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults or 44% of adult Internet users have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites. 13% of Internet users maintain their own Web sites. Around 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.”

As web site owners and operators – and through those digital windows, as promoters and distributors of our products and services – we’ve got to stop assuming that internet users are passive receptors. They are active participants in the creation of the content on the Internet. Content which they in turn consume.

Heard of ‘blogs’, of ‘blogging’? You haven’t? Stop reading this article, open a browser window and Google the word ‘blog’.

Blogs are probably the biggest thing to hit the Net in recent times. For the uninitiated blogs are online journals, generally run by an individual, or small group. They’re the digital media’s equivalent of a diary. Sometimes they are simply the catalogue of a person’s everyday life, others focus on particular topics or themes. Most blogs allow the reader to contribute via a range of interactions such as submitting comments, votes etc.

The Pew survey noted above also found 2% of internet users maintained a blog. Another Pew survey in 2004 put that proportion at between 2% and 7%. Doesn’t sound a lot. But as with all statistics you need to know the raw numbers.

WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS

World Regions

Population

( 2004 Est.)

Internet Usage,

( Year 2000 )

Internet Usage,

Latest Data

User Growth

( 2000-2004 )

Penetration

(% Population )

% of

World

Africa

893,197,200

4,514,400

12,937,100

186.6 %

1.4 %

1.6 %

Asia

3,607,499,800

114,303,000

257,898,314

125.6 %

7.1 %

31.7 %

Europe

730,894,078

103,096,093

230,886,424

124.0 %

31.6 %

28.4 %

Middle East

258,993,600

5,284,800

17,325,900

227.8 %

6.7 %

2.1 %

North America

325,246,100

108,096,800

222,165,659

105.5 %

68.3 %

27.3 %

Latin America/Caribbean

541,775,800

18,068,919

55,930,974

209.5 %

10.3 %

6.9 %

Oceania

32,540,909

7,619,500

15,787,221

107.2 %

48.5 %

1.9 %

WORLD TOTAL

6,390,147,487

360,983,512

812,931,592

125.2 %

12.7 %

100.0 %

Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com

Just in case you’re curious about Australia :

OCEANIA

Population

( 2004 Est. )

Usage, in

Dec/2000

Internet Usage,

Latest Data

Use Growth

(2000-2004)

% Population

(Penetration)

% Users

Oceania

Australia

20,275,700

6,600,000

13,359,821

102.4%

65.9 %

84.9 %

2% of 800 million is a heck of a lot of bloggers (people who write blogs). The founder of a business set up to specifically create tools for the blogsphere (the world of blogs) reckons “about 12,000 new blogs pop up online worldwide each day. On about 10 million blogs today, writers are posting about 400,000 new items per day. That’s more than 16,000 per hour“. He says:

“This reminds me of the Web in 1994. It’s an ecosystem that’s evolving and just being built”.

Here’s some specific perspective:

“Super-popular blogger Glen Reynolds, of Instapundit.com, leaves his traffic logs open, where we can see that he averages around 100,000 visitors a day and more than 2 million uniques a month. Considering that he’s only one guy, that’s astounding. By comparison, HoustonChronicle.com reports 1.5 million unique monthly readers. Granted, Instapundit is one of the most widely read bloggers out there, but it puts the phenomenon in perspective.”

One guy’s online journal attracts more readers than a leading online US newspaper? How wild is that?

The other day I read a great article online, an interview with Jeff Jarvis – amongst other things the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. He’s also a well-known blogger. I was completely struck by Jeff’s forceful explanation of this world of self-published digital content:

“So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the centralization of media — the marketplace, the network, the monopoly — is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the economics. It changes the power.

Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will. Today they are challenging and changing media — where bloggers now fact-check Dan Rather’s ass — but tomorrow they will challenge and change politics, government, marketing, and education as well. This isn’t just a media revolution, though that’s where we are seeing the impact first. This is a chain-reaction of revolutions. It has just begun.”

I immediately emailed the article link off to our company’s chairman Terry Cutler, who soon emailed back a one line note: ‘remember cluetrain.com’.

I haven’t actually confessed to the boss yet, but I had completely forgotten. I have a bad memory at the best of times, but the crunch is Clue Train was written in 1999, years before we even invented the word ‘blog’, and before many people were even talking about the phenomenon of self-published digital content. At the time I didn’t get it either.

Clue Train is a book, and you can read it for free on the web site http://www.cluetrain.com/. At the heart is the Clue Train Manifesto:



























we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp

deal with it

The Clue Train Manifesto

Online Markets…

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

…People of Earth

The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you’ve been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.

The front of the web site says:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

Scroll down the home page and you can read the 95 Theses. Yeah, it’s a few pages to print out, but all you arts managers must print it, and read it. Try number 27:

“By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.” Sound familiar? I’ve worked in and around the arts for 20 years, and I still marvel at some of the arts crap spewed out at an unsuspecting public – a public which, in the main, didn’t study Brecht and Voltaire for three years at NIDA . Some read like a PhD dissertation.

I’ll let you read the other 94. It’s the best darn half an hour you’ll spend this month, if you truly want to understand how an arts organisation – indeed any business – needs to think, act and react in today’s digital online world. A world where 13,359,821 of your own countypeople are online, where 812,931,592 of your global compatriots access the internet. Where nearly 60% don’t just sit passively in front of a computer screen, but actively contribute their words, thoughts, photos, experiences, opinions, their lives.

I think the days of me turning up like a passive blob, sitting up straight, in a theatre, indeed any arts event, are over. My days of relying on the guff you arts publicists send out to me via the newspaper, direct mail, press release, poster and flyer are over. The days where the only insight I have into the performance is the one page of Director’s Notes in the program are over.

Because I feel a responsibility to actually research my Click to Start columns I conducted an extensive poll of my findings. Oh, alright, I had a chat to one of the Arts Hub staff over a smoke in the backgarden. She’s an experienced theatre director and performer, she immediately had two ideas – a web cam live to the Net during rehearsal, and writing a blog when her new show hits the road in a few months.

Goodness, a director willing to let the great unwashed randomly access the development of the art without a filter or editing; and then willing to write about taking the art to the masses across the country. Heresy – for a non-digital world. Natural – in a networked digital marketplace.

Click to Start – Never Change Your Phone Number Again

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Ever sat at your desk tapping your fingers waiting for another staff member to finish their call, so you could dial a number? How would you like a telephone system with unlimited incoming lines? And unlimited outgoing lines?

Indeed, how about a small business telephone system which:

  • Only needs one phone line from the street
  • Has a telephone number you can take with you anywhere
  • Has no PABX box or complicated wiring to install in your office – in fact, which doesn’t need any telephone wiring at all
  • Receives faxes as emails straight to your inbox
  • Receives voicemail as MP3 files
  • Doesn’t need a technician to come onsite for every minor system change
  • Costs substantially less than a normal telephone system

    Sound good? It is good, and it’s making Telstra and other large ingrained telephone companies around the world very nervous.

    Last week here at Arts Hub we threw away our expensive leased PABX system, and installed a brand new VOIP (voice over internet protocol) telephone system. It features all the benefits on the list above, and more.

    So what is VOIP? Basically it’s telephones run over an internet connection. Nowadays if you ring Arts Hub, instead of your voice hurtling down one of hundreds of copper wires laid under our street and into our building, it’s chopped up into bits and bytes and sent to us over the Internet. Some cool software and hardware housed at our internet provider grabs the phone call and directs it to our phone handsets, and hey presto, our phone rings.

    With non-VOIP telephone systems you need a piece of copper wire coming in from the street for each incoming telephone line. So if your PABX has four phone lines, you need four pieces of copper. And if each of the four lines are being used, no-one else can make a call out – and conversely, and possibly more critically, no-one call you.

    With VOIP incoming and outgoing lines are virtual, they are created on the fly as need. So in the Arts Hub office we can have every handset operating, answering and making calls, all at the same time. And we need only one phone line – and that’s for our internet connection.

    It’s not hard to see why the Telstra’s of this world are worried by VOIP. Research by McKinsey Consulting suggests $US5.5 billion could be lost from the traditional fixed line market across to VOIP. The percentage of fixed line users who might switch to VOIP by 2010 around the world is forecast as high as 26% – that’s Japan, often an earlier adopter. But Forrester still suggests 7 or 8% of users in European countries like France and Italy could switch in the next five years. Just how fast the takeup of VOIP will rocket ahead depends on which research report you read, but for example:

    “The global consumer VoIP market is forecast to grow from almost 16 million users at the end of 2004 to 197 million users at the end of 2008, according to Ovum, a technology consultancy based in London.

    Over half of these users will use a voice service originating from a PDA, games console, or PC that is integrated with chat, instant messaging, or text messaging.”

    The second paragraph is the really interesting one – because when making telephone calls is not tied to telephone equipment, a whole new world opens up. Now any internet enabled device, such as a game console, can be used. All it needs is a broadband internet connection.

    A survey of coporate executives worldwide conducted on behalf of US phone giant AT&T last year found:

    “43 percent of respondents were currently using, testing or planning to implement VoIP within the next two years. A further 18 percent said they planned to implement VoIP in the longer term.”

    In Australia a report entitled ‘Australia VoIP Services Forecast and Analysis, 2002-2007’ says:

    “VoIP will continue to be the sweetspot of next-generation networks. It will double every year over the next four years from $14.3 million in 2003 to $288 million by 2007.”

    It’s important to point out the big boys of the telecommunications industry are not taking all this lying down, an article in the Age last week says Telstra has 200 people testing a VOIP solution in Melbourne at the moment.

    VOIP is not just for business – it’s for home as well, and offers some pretty neat opportunities, including free phone calls anywhere in the world. Many people would have tried talking with audio, and perhaps video, to another computer user. As long as you have broadband, and the right software – which these days just means something like Microsoft Messenger – you can communicate to your hearts delight for no more cost than the use of your internet connection. Here’s some basic stuff about VOIP at home. And a good article from the Melbourne PC User Group.

    So what does our VOIP phone system look like? The first thing to get your head around is that VOIP doesn’t run over phone lines, it uses the same network cables as connect your computers together. The telephone units have two sockets on the back, into one you plug the network cable which normally runs to your computer. Then you use a short cable to connect from the second outlet to your computer – the handset just sits inline with your network cable.

    And that’s it. There’s no big mysterious box on the wall, nor a million wires sprouting out of the wall. We don’t even have phone points installed in the office. All the magic happens at our internet provider’s offices. Anywhere we can reach with a network cable we can put a phone. Plus, and much more cool, we also have a wireless phone. It uses our existing wireless network here at the office, the handset looks just like any normal cordless phone.

    In the middle of writing this Click to Start there was a call for me, and some poor soul wound up lost in cyberspace because the staff messed up transferring the call to me. As with any new office system there is a degree of training involved, to teach people how to push the right button – but that’s inevitable whatever equipment you introduce.

    Pricing compares very favourably. Our PABX system had four lines – for which Telstra charged us something like $40 per month each – and we paid around $300 a month to lease the PABX. With VOIP you don’t pay per line – because there aren’t any. Instead you pay per handset. So we now don’t pay for lines, and we don’t pay to lease the PABX.

    We’re paying $9.90 lease per handset per month. Call costs are at least 20% cheaper, I reckon, than Telstra.  VOIP is also very scalable. If we want another handset, we just plug it in. If we’re losing quality because of too many concurrent simultaneous phone calls, we just up the speed on our internet connection. No longer do we call the phone company and tell them to come and run more wires from the street.

    What’s the downside you ask? Well, like anything, and particularly something new, there are some issues:

  • Security – if you are genuinely concerned about security issues, the ability for an eavesdropper listening in on your calls, then you should exercise caution and research the issue with your service provider. Security for VOIP is in its infancy.
  • Quality – the quality of the phone calls can vary depending on your equipment, internet connection, and the quality of the network run by your service provider. I’ve now made a few dozen calls, and the worst problem I’ve had was a slight echo, a short delay on my voice. At the end of the day though, nothing as bad as calling a dodgy mobile phone.

    The one price we’ve had to pay is a change to our telephone number – which isn’t a bad thing. Even though callers wouldn’t know, we’ve been diverting calls from our main (03) 9682 9920 number since late last year when we moved office. We only shifted a couple of suburbs, but we changed telephone exchanges, so Telstra was unable to move the number. That’s now a thing of the past, our new number (03) 8320 3222 is virtual – we can take it anywhere. With any luck Arts Hub will never need to change its telephone number ever again.

    http://www.ozinternetphones.com/ – a pretty good Australian site with a list of providers

    http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-threads.cfm?f=107 – the Whirlpool VOIP discussion

    • Click to Start – Art and Technology Changes Things

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    Last week I was proud to deliver the Occasional Address to the graduating students from the arts and technology faculties at the University of Ballarat. In preparing my speech I spent some time pondering the intersection of arts and technology, and building the case supporting their critical role in our future world.

    Returning home I realised that Arts Hub members might be interested in the sentiment, and so below is the text of my speech.

    Deputy Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Members of University Council, distinguished guests, ladies and gentleman. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to be with you.

    When I first received an invitation to speak to you today, I had visions of standing here uttering witty anecdotes of life as the owner of a business which has as its core the melding of the arts world with the technology world.

    On reflection I discounted this idea. Firstly because as a stand up comedian I make a much better dishwasher, and secondly, and most importantly, because I realized there were some issues important to me which I wanted to address.

    I’m particularly pleased to be speaking today because all of you here represent the people I believe are the chosen ones as our planet moves forward into the 21st century.

    We live in a world dominated by political systems, and a media, that make much of economic circumstances. Which openly promotes the division between the haves and the have nots. We are deep in a global economic cycle which has led to unbelievable growth in personal wealth, often at the expense of many of the people who do the actual work which results in extraordinary prosperity for a select few.

    Many people of this world live in countries whose political masters deliberately isolate a minority in order to promote an socio-economic agenda to the majority.

    Their tactics are exclusionary, short sighted, and use fear of the new and unknown to encourage people to look backwards instead of forwards.

    Why do I think this is important to you? Because I think you are the people who have the greatest chance of effecting change, of changing the world.

    So today I’d like to touch on a couple of the issues close to my heart. For starters how art and technology are in fact two sides of the same coin; how the arts creates clever people; and then how the intellectual property created by arts and technology have the power to achieve incredible economic and social change.

    Art and Technology Hand in Hand

    Art and technology go hand in hand. There’s a magazine article from 10 years ago I refer back to once in a while. The author was commenting on the use of technology in the arts, and explained that sometimes technology was ahead of the artists, sometimes behind. Sometimes artists use technology in ways the technologists never envisaged. Sometimes the technologists equip the artists to achieve an artistic vision previously unattainable. The magazine article concludes that

    “The relationship between the artist and the technologist needs to be seen less as a two side topology, rather, with a not so simple half twist we can turn it into a Moebius Strip, which only has one side.”

    It’s how I see arts and technology – two sides of the same coin.

    Arts Creates Clever People

    A research project in the United States, which analysed a database of 25,000 school students, found that students with high levels of arts participation outperform “arts-poor” students by virtually every measure. Now if you think about it, that’s not particularly surprising. Children of wealthier families very often have greater opportunity to engage with the Arts. But the researchers were genuinely surprised when they crunched the numbers some more.

    What they found was a statistical significance in comparisons of high and low arts participants in the lowest socioeconomic segments.

    The research showed that high arts participation makes a more significant difference to students from low-income backgrounds than for high-income students.

    They also found clear evidence that sustained involvement in particular art forms—music and theatre —are highly correlated with success in mathematics and reading.

    Intellectual Property and Copyright

    While I was researching some thoughts for today, I came across some both sobering and exciting information on the web site of the World Bank.

    According to a recent World Bank report, the countries that became richer over the last 30 years were those that mostly export intellectual property. Their incomes grew faster. The incomes of poor countries that mostly export raw materials didn’t grow at all. It’s a stark contrast for an Australian economy that continues, to a large degree, to be underpinned by stuff dug out of the ground, instead of stuff dug out of our brains. An argument I know needs no explaining in this forum.

    Intellectual property has helped the rich countries’ economies grow. An easy example is the insidious spread of Hollywood movies and television. I use the word insidious carefully, programs like Joe Millionaire, Survivor and Sex and the City have a lot to answer for. Yet my four year old son is entranced by Blues Clues. He watches Sesame Street with the same sense of excitement as I did when I was watching 30 years ago.

    Our son is contributing, in his own small way, to a massive growth in the export of intellectual property by the United States. For example:

  • In 2002, the U.S. “total” copyright industries accounted for an estimated 12% of the U.S. gross domestic product ($1.25 trillion).
  • The “total” copyright industries employed 8.41% of U.S. workers in 2002 (11.47 million workers). This level approaches the total employment levels of the entire health care and social assistance sector (15.3 million) and the entire U.S. manufacturing sector (14.5 million workers in 21 manufacturing industries).
  • In 2002, the U.S. copyright industries achieved foreign sales and exports estimated at $89.26 billion. That’s more than the motor vehicle industry and the aviation industry

    Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying all of this is automatically good. Anyone who’s suffered through the 95th repeat of Frasier, or Everybody Loves Raymond, can easily point out that not all exported intellectual property is automatically a positive influence for the importing nation.

    The Global Marketplace

    Let’s look at the global marketplace America and the rest of us are playing in:

  • Music Composition and Production – Worth $56 billion globally in 2002.
  • Film market worth $14-$17 billion globally in 2002.
  • World market for games and ‘edutainment’/reference software expected to reach $49 billion in 2007.
  • Global television distribution market estimated at $215 billion in 2002.

    Add those four items up and you’ve got a global marketplace of $337 billion. And this list doesn’t include other sectors such as design, performing arts, or books and publishing.

    The creative and technology industries are the key contributors to these huge numbers.

    And when I talk about contributors, I mean you. You are the next generation of people who will take on the challenges of the world, who will build the next generation of artistic and technological endeavour.

    The creative and technology industries are the creators of intellectual property, of ideas and innovation – the greatest export assets Australia can possibly have. Bob Hawke called us the ‘Clever Country’, Kim Beazley gave us ‘Knowledge Nation’, Peter Beatty in Queensland has just announced the banana benders are no more, Queensland is now the ‘Smart State’.

    So how are we looking in Australia?

  • According to the Australia Council, Australia’s exports of cultural goods and services have grown steadily in recent years, to $1776 million. But, it should be pointed out our imports are twice that. Blame Sex in the City and Frasier again.
  • Creative industries add approximately $11 billion to the value of all goods and services in Australia (around 2% of GDP).
  • Only 25,000 Australian businesses export — just 4% of the firms in the country, a proportion slightly ahead of the United States, but below Canada, Spain and Norway.

    All of which tells us two things. Firstly we’re are trying to find a foothold in the global arena; and secondly, there is a quite ludicrous sized potential in the global marketplace for us to expand and grow our creative exports.

    Art and Technology Change Things

    In 1937 Pablo Picasso painted one of his most well known pictures. It’s called Guernica, and it’s named after a town in Spain which was terribly affected by the Spanish Civil War. Guernica is probably modern art’s strongest anti-war statement.

    It’s a very large picture, painted to decorate the Spanish stand at the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris – so it was seen by a vast number of people in a very short space of time. It’s been called ‘more of a cartoon than a picture’, because the text is writ so large in the image. It caused great controversy by bringing to the public conscience an important issue of the day.

    Skip forward 70 years, a few months ago bloggers on the Internet forced the resignation of one of America’s most prominent television news readers. CBS news anchor Dan Rather stepped down after bloggers revealed that a series of documents he had broadcast about President George Bush’s military record, were in fact fakes.

    A small group of individuals in their lounge rooms connected to the world via the Internet, did what apparently one of America’s largest media organisations could not – prove that Dan was wrong.

    The impact of technology on our world and society is truly pervasive; likewise the influence of the arts. From Web masters and graphic designers to architects and filmmakers, a new generation of techno-artists is very much in demand.

    There are big issues, and big challenges ahead for you. But you have been equipped with the tools and the knowledge and, I hope, the passion and commitment to employ them.

    If you don’t like something in our world or community, stand up and say so.

    The arts give rise to a myriad of forms of expression, to communicate your message. Technology can both assist to create the message, enables you to tell the whole world instantly.

    At the intersection of art and technology lies one of the most fertile grounds for creative expression, of creating economic prosperity, of redressing the imbalance between the haves and the have nots.

    Together art and technology truly can change the world.

    I wish you all the best as you make your way in the world. Very many congratulations on your graduation, and thank you for the invitation to speak to you today.

    • Click to Start – The Market Stall Arts Economy

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    The release of Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class has sparked a new wave of public and government awareness of the value of creatives to the broader economy. Florida’s argument is pretty simple: cities which encourage and promote a positive and nurturing atmosphere for creative industries workers reap economic rewards. His latest book, The Flight of the Creative Class, takes America to task for not doing enough, and warns that the creatives will seek a home elsewhere in the world instead, thereby depriving the United States even further.

    I don’t disagree with the fundamental propositions offered by Florida. I enjoy living in Melbourne. I enjoy walking down Acland Street, near my home in St Kilda with my children exclaiming in delight at the massive artworks perched atop the hairdresser. I always encourage the kids to give money to the buskers. On Sundays we browse along the  St Kilda Sunday Market stalls, tasting and testing all manner of home produced goods and artworks.

    And it’s when I’m wandering the markets I realise what I’m seeing – an arts business economy hard at work. Last time I looked, the Australia Council doesn’t hand out grants to run an arts market stall. Or offer a free download on their web site of publications to help an artist research, plan and operate a market stall. Yet the markets are a microcosm of a massive arts economy.

    I’m not going to bother to quote the statistics. We can elocute to the fact Australia’s cultural economy is worth billions of dollars. That it employs hundreds of thousands of people. And that it exports all over the world – even if our imports of cultural product outstrip the exports by two to one.

    The market stalls remind me that an economy which cannot stand on its own two feet is not an economy. No-one in their right mind is going to take the trouble to book and pay for their stall; muster up stock; set the alarm for an ungodly hour on a Sunday morning; and stand in the winter chill on a cold pavement all day while hordes of only sometimes interested people tramp past, touching, prodding and poking the stall holder’s wares – unless it makes economic sense. This isn’t a government funded art-fest. It isn’t art for arts sake. It’s business. It’s a way for the stall holder to earn money to help feed themselves and often their families.

    You cannot bypass business fundamentals. A market stall costs x amount to rent. The goods you sell on the stall cost y in materials to produce. The customers hand over z to purchase the goods. If z is greater than x plus y, then you made a profit. If less, you made a loss. And what on earth would possess someone to continue if it made a loss? Richard Pratt, the cardboard box making, showbiz supporting billionaire was once asked his secret to successful business. His response: earn more than you spend.

    Back in the early 1980s when I finished school I had no idea in the world what I wanted to do. I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University, majoring in English, English, English, oh and more English. Which means I can spell. I got kicked out after first year – probably something to do with a complete lack of work in the last part of the year. Albeit following a promising start, with plenty of distinctions and credits in the first couple of terms.

    Problem is, I was bored shitless. I was in a holding pattern. I was completely uninformed about the world, and uninformed about my choices in the world. I became involved in student theatre, wound up with a job in the campus theatre, and that led to a 12 year career in technical and operations management in theatre and entertainment facilities around the country.

    If I could have my university application all over again, I would apply for an economics course. In retrospect, it’s quite clear to me I would have been a far better arts manager had I completed an economics degree, rather than one in arts management. Today, with nearly ten years under my belt running my own company, it frightens me to look back, and realise how naïve, uninformed and generally ignorant of business I was in my arts management days. Clearly I stumbled through and didn’t fall completely on my face but, I suspect, there are plenty of arts managers out there stumbling along today.

    If I had had an economics degree under my belt, I might have started to ask the questions 20 years ago that I ponder today. Because despite my acceptance of the general Florida mantra, I’m now coming to the conclusion that government grants for the arts – grants given to arts companies and individuals, are a bad thing.

    Grants breed a welfare mentality, of living with the expectation of funding. Long term unemployed, those who have been the recipients of government handouts, are considered amongst the most disadvantaged in our community. Great amounts of time and money is deployed in the quest to return them to the workplace and employment. Yet arts companies, and some artists, have been effectively living on government welfare for decades. Oh, sure, from time to time there are murmurs of ‘reducing their reliance on recurrent funding’, but nobody takes it really seriously. There is a presumption inherent in arts managers that whatever the ebb and flow of trendy management theory amongst government arts agencies, at the end of the day the triennial funding agreement will still come through.

    Grant funding is a vicious, non- productive circle – just like long term reliance on the dole. It ties people into a pre-determined model, instead of exploring alternatives. It’s a bureaucratic, unimaginative way to do business. Each year the Australia Council and sundry state government arts ministries publish their glossy grant round booklets. Each year arts managers and artists pore over the colourful pages, considering how they can manipulate and massage their current visions into the frameworks compiled by a bunch of government employees sitting in their ergonomically designed cubicles.

    Grants cost the applicant time and money. You take time to apply, to wait for a response, to report and acquit. Yet you can’t claim that time and labour as part of the grant application. In many cases, if you perform an ROI (Return on Investment), the cost to service the grant could be larger than the grant itself. It’s a poor economic decision.

    It’s easy to blame a lack of artistic output on a lack of funding support. Yet the funding levels will never substantially change. The arts has been arguing it is under-funded for decades. Apparently the first Australian arts grant was given in the early 1880s – a poet named Michael Robinson was given a couple of government cows for his services as Poet Laureate. Inevitably one can presume two things: Robinson didn’t think two cows was enough, and all his fellow poets thought he had compromised his artistic integrity for taking the cows in the first place. 

    Grants avoid ruthless feedback. Yet acceptance of feedback is a critical skill to survive in life and business. And to improve an artist’s work. Instead the feedback is couched in jargon and comfort words aimed at avoiding confrontation.

    I want to be clear here – I’m talking specifically about application based grant funding. For example, conversely to grants, I believe sponsorship and philanthropic support are outstandingly positive elements. They promote business and community interaction, they are, generally speaking, based on realistic business objectives and ideals, whether it be a major telecommunications company sponsoring the Australian Opera, or the local printer supporting a local theatre company by printing the show’s posters for free.

    Every election, every budget, the arts makes yet more submissions to government. Occasionally incremental increases are found. Some major arts sectors have been on the bust boom cycle for years – the latest are the symphony orchestras, before that the visual arts, before that performing arts companies. Of course it requires an expensive public enquiry conducted by a high profile person (notice how the enquiry heads are invariably high profile BUSINESS people: Helen Nugent, Rupert Myer, James Strong) to find that the enquired-upon arts sector is economically unviable in its present shape/form/composition/funding level/audience size.

    In my more extreme moments I conceive of dumping arts grants altogether. Maybe arts organisations should be made to endure the same economic realities as the Sunday Market stall holders. Perhaps we’re giving the money to the wrong people? Lets instead give it to the audiences – the general public – in the form of rebates for attendance. Instead of ‘Medicare’, why not have ‘Artscare’? Each time a person pays to go to an arts event, they tootle down to the ‘Artscare’ office, fill out a form, and receive a portion of their attendance cost back. We can even have bulk billing for children and seniors.

    A long time ago a well respected arts manager told me mine would be the last generation of arts administrators without university degrees. She was quite right. My problem is whether the training institutions of today are pumping out bright-eyed graduates with the right skills sets? 

    I’ve had reason of late to delve into the world of Cooperative Research Centres, a major Federal government program to support centres of research excellence in conjunction with universities and industry. The quick summary of the CRCs is:

    “The programme emphasises the importance of collaborative arrangements to maximise the benefits of research through an enhanced process of utilisation, commercialisation and technology transfer. It also has a strong education component with a focus on producing graduates with skills relevant to industry needs.

    The CRC Programme was established in 1990 to improve the effectiveness of Australia’s research and development effort. It links researchers with industry to focus R&D efforts on progress towards utilisation and commercialisation. The close interaction between researchers and the users of research is a key feature of the programme. Another feature is industry contribution to CRC education programmes to produce industry-ready graduates.”

    If I had my way, this would be a pretty good philosophy for the universities when turning out arts graduates – of all flavours and disciplines. The tertiary institutions are seen as centres of excellence, producing industry-ready graduates. The institutions’ efforts are focussed on projects and activities which have commercialisation potential, and thus economic potential – entirely consistent with the Florida thesis of using cultural activity to stimulate a community’s economic vitality with creative endeavours and personnel.

    The graduates are encouraged to take the lead, to do it for themselves, to act independently and in a way which is productive to themselves and others through making a cultural contribution to their local economy. Just like a Sunday Market stall holder. Instead of waiting around for a grant application to be approved.

    Click to Start

    Posted on by

    Click to Start was a column I wrote for a while on artshub.com.au a few years ago.

     

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       

          

          

       

       
     

     
     

     

     

    > The Need for Speed 20/06/2002
    > The Gift Which Keeps On Giving 4/07/2002
    > How would you like to pay for that? 19/07/2002
    > Lights, Camera, Action 1/08/2002
    > The currency of content 20/02/2003
    > Define or be defined 18/06/2003
    > Tinkering Around With New Technology 7/07/2003
    > Arts Outcomes for Non-Arts Projects 10/08/2003
    > Twenty Years of Shooting Ourselves in the Foot 26/08/2003
    > Slow Thinking Music Dinosaur 30/01/2004
    > Do You Berry? 15/06/2004
    > A Tourniquet on Cultural Endeavour 21/06/2004
    > Campaigning Online 5/07/2004
    > Eventually disaster befalls everyone 13/10/2004
    > Written by the Readers 19/11/2004
    > Never Change Your Phone Number Again 7/03/2005
    > Art and Technology Changes Things 18/05/2005
    > The Market Stall Arts Economy 1/07/2005